Why need Debian?

[Tshepang Lekhonkhobe]

On 10/24/05, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Daniel Robitaille wrote:
>
> >> A few times I have statements in the ubuntu website that there can't
> >> be Ubuntu if there's no Debian. This statement seems to me like it's
> >> only relevant to Warty, but why should they continue taking debian
> >> sources, especially considering that Ubuntu's main is normally ahead
> >> of Debian's sid? Is it the avoidance of effort duplication or is a
> >> matter of maintaining compatibility or...?
>
> Both.
> >
> > Ubuntu is more than Main; it's also universe and multiverse.  Between
> > the 3 that's the 16,000 packages available in both in Debian and
> > Ubuntu.  Debian  has over 1000 maintainers/developpers to take care of
> > all this.   Ubuntu has what?  maybe 50 people between paid developpers
> > and community members (mostly via MOTU).   Ubuntu cannot exist without
> > Debian  because you cannot compare the size of the people maintaning
> > this large body of packages.
> >
> > While some of the more visible aspect of Ubuntu seems to be generally
> > ahead of Debian (think here Gnome, Xorg, etc), many of the
> > applications in Main are directly coming from Debian, and we get new
> > versions in Ubuntu simple because of updates in the Debian's sid.
> > There isn't the maiunpower to do it all by ourselve in Ubuntu.
>
> And why would we want to? There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Debian,
> there's just some issues that keep the release cycle down to a crawl.
> Though I've seen some complaints from Debian people about Ubuntu, in the
> long run I can only see the two complementing each other.
>
> I still follow (and post to) a number of Debian lists.
> --
> derek

Perhaps the problem is that I don't have too much of an idea of what
it takes to maintain a package in a distro (as opposed to upstream
package). It appears to me, from this thread, that it's much more work
to debianise (Ubuntu or Debian) a package than to convert Debian debs
into Ubuntu debs. Can someone verify this for me... and thanks for the
replies.